


Excerpts from the "Supernatural" Novels by Carver Edlund

by Stargazer1323



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:32:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 21,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stargazer1323/pseuds/Stargazer1323
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it says on the label. Each chapter is an excerpt from a different book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Supernatural

**November 2, 1983**

“Come on, let’s say goodnight to your little brother.”

At four years old, Dean is getting big, but Mary still scoops him up in her arms and carries him up the stairs to Sammy’s nursery. Dean eagerly wriggles out of her arms as they approach the crib, so Mary sets him down and watches him run up and use the step-stool by the crib to reach his baby brother. “‘Night, Sam,” he says as he leans over and gently kisses the baby on the forehead. He is already so good with Sammy, always asking to feed him and play with him and hold him when he cries—the best older brother a little boy could ask for.

Mary leans over the crib and mirrors Dean’s kiss. “Goodnight, love,” she whispers to the baby, who coos and smiles sleepily up at her.

There are footsteps on the stairs, then John’s voice from the doorway. “Hey, Dean.”

“Daddy!” Dean runs to John with outstretched arms and is swept up into a big bear-hug.

“Hey, buddy. So, what do you think? You think Sammy’s ready to toss around a football yet?”

“No, Daddy,” Dean replies with a laugh, and Mary can’t help but smile at her husband. He’s been making that joke since the day they brought Sam home from the hospital, and somehow it still hasn’t gotten old.

“You got him?” she asks John as she passes him on her way out of the room.

“Yeah, I got him,” John says as Dean wraps his arms tightly around his father’s neck. Just before he turns to leave the room, John glances down at Sam in his crib with a loving smile. “Sweet dreams, Sam.” Then he turns out the lights and follows Mary down the hall to Dean’s room.

Several hours later, the crackling of the baby monitor wakes Mary from a sound sleep. She rolls over, hoping to send John in there just this once, but the other side of the bed is empty. With a yawn, she stumbles out of bed and heads down the hallway to the nursery. Much to her surprise, John is already there, a dark silhouette standing over the crib.

“John? Is he hungry?”

“Shh,” is the only reply.

“Okay.” It’s an odd response, but since she can’t hear Sammy crying any more, he must have just gotten him to fall back to sleep. Rubbing her eyes, Mary turns to head back to her own bed, but the flickering of the lamp at the end of the hallway catches her attention. Suspecting a loose bulb, she wanders over to it and taps on the glass until it stops flickering. Then, she notices that it isn’t the only flickering light in the house. Downstairs, someone appears to have left the TV on.

She heads down the stairs to turn it off, but freezes halfway as she catches sight of the silhouette of a man sleeping in the armchair in front of the TV. It is John; she can tell by the sound of his snoring. Her blood turns to ice in her veins for the briefest of moments, then she is running back up the stairs to the nursery.

“Sammy? Sammy!”

**********

John is awakened by the sound of his wife screaming. Still half-asleep, he bolts out of his chair and is halfway up the stairs before he even realizes what is happening. “Mary? Mary!”

The screams were coming from the nursery, but when he bursts in, shouting her name, she isn’t there. The room is dark, and Sam is gurgling away in his crib. Maybe it was just a nightmare? To reassure himself that everything is really all right, he goes over to the crib to check on the baby. “Hey, Sammy,” he says as he looks down at his son. “You okay?” The baby smiles up at him just as a spot of something dark appears on the blanket next to his head. John reaches down to touch it, then pulls his hand back in surprise as two more drops of something warm and wet fall directly onto the back of his hand. He glances up at the ceiling, trying to find the source of the drops. Then, his entire body goes numb in horror.

Mary is pinned to the ceiling by some invisible force, limbs splayed out, terror on her face. A deep gash across her stomach is staining her nightgown red and dripping blood. As John falls to the floor, calling her name, the ceiling around her bursts into flames.

“Mary! No!”

The room is being consumed by fire, but it is the baby’s screaming that finally breaks John out of his terrified paralysis. He pulls himself to his feet, grabs Sam from the crib, and races for the door. In the hallway, he almost trips over Dean, who is standing outside his bedroom door rubbing his eyes and coughing as smoke fills up the house.

“Daddy?”

Without even thinking, John shoves Sammy into Dean’s arms. “Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don’t look back!” he shouts at Dean over the roar of the flames from the nursery. “Now, Dean! Go!” He waits just long enough to see Dean turn with the baby in his arms and head for the stairs, then he runs back towards the nursery. He can’t lose her. Not like this.

“Mary!”

*************************************************************************************************************************************************************

**October 31, 2005**

Sam is glad that Halloween is basically over. He understands the appeal of it for other people—especially college students—but given the things he’s seen and done in his life, he just can’t get behind a holiday that celebrates the terrifying and the weird, especially when most people don’t even believe in the ghouls and ghosts and monsters that they dress up as.

He has to admit that Jess’s ‘sexy nurse’ costume was pretty awesome, though, and having an excuse to go out and celebrate his LSAT score more than made up for not being able to gloat about the news to his family. And after the interview on Monday, he will have the future he has always wanted. As he closes his eyes and begins to drift off to sleep, he idly wonders if he’ll have a chance to go back to that jewelry store before then. A romantic picnic in the park to celebrate him getting into law school would be the perfect opportunity…

A crash from the living room brings Sam back to full alert. He instinctively reaches under his pillow, then remembers that he stopped sleeping with a knife under there when Jess moved in. Not that he needs it. Rising silently from the bed so as not to wake Jess, he creeps to the door, opens it slowly, and steps into the hallway.

From the doorway, he can see that one of the living room windows, which he never leaves unlocked at night, is open. At the creak of footsteps on the floorboards, he turns just in time to see a shadowy figure enter the kitchen. He follows it, stepping lightly to keep the floor from creaking and readying himself for a fight.

He gets the drop on the intruder, lashing out while the figure’s back is turned, so he is surprised when the figure turns and catches the fist that Sam had aimed at the back of its head. Sam kicks out, and the figure dodges that too, then starts throwing punches of its own. The two of them retreat back across the kitchen and into the living room, trading a flurry of equally-matched punches, kicks, and parries, until a well-placed blow to his ankle sends Sam reeling. The intruder presses the advantage, grabs Sam in a throw hold, and they both go down.

“Woah, easy, tiger!”

Stunned, Sam looks up. From the glow of the street lamps outside, he can finally make out the intruder’s face, and it is shockingly familiar, right down to the cocky grin.

“Dean?” he asks as he catches his breath. “You scared the crap out of me!”

“That’s ‘cause you’re outta practice.” His brother is laughing, but Sam can tell he’s winded too. He also realizes that he now has several inches on Dean, and that he’s too old to be taking this kind of crap any more. Catching Dean off-guard, he manages to flip his brother’s throw hold, knock him to the ground, and pin him before he finishes the last syllable of ‘practice’.

“…Or not.” There is surprise in Dean’s expression if not his voice when he realizes the tables have turned. “Get off me.” Sam holds him down for one more second as he struggles, just to show Dean he can, then helps him to his feet.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Sam hasn’t seen or spoken to his brother in years, and they hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms.

“Well, I was looking for a beer,” Dean jokes, clapping Sam on the shoulder and looking just the tiniest bit taken aback at the fact that he now has to look up at his little brother.

Sam shrugs off the gesture, not ready yet to find amusement in the fact that his brother just broke into his house. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asks again.

“Okay, all right.” Dean backs off, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “We need to talk.”

“Uh, the phone?”

“If I’d’a called, would you have picked up?”

It’s a valid question, and the fact that he doesn’t have a good answer briefly pricks Sam’s conscience. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to answer, because just then, the lights come on. Both brothers turn simultaneously to see Jess standing in the doorway, yawning and looking concerned.

“Sam?”

Sam grimaces. He had been hoping not to wake her. “Jess. Hey.” Then, seeing the too-interested look on his brother’s face, he turns to Dean and says, pointedly, “Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jessica.” Emphasis on the ‘girlfriend’.

Jess’s eyes widen at this. “Wait; your brother, Dean?” She’s heard the stories—even the ones that don’t involve monsters have been enough to paint a pretty clear picture of Sam’s older brother.

If Dean notices the surprise in her voice, though, he ignores it completely. “I love the Smurfs,” he says, leering at her pajama top. “You know, I gotta tell you, you are completely out of my brother’s league.”

Sam bristles at this, but Jess just gives Dean a disgusted glare. “Just let me go put something on.”

“No, no, no. I wouldn’t dream of it. Seriously.” Dean’s unrepentant grin grows even wider at being snubbed, but when Jess turns back to give him a real piece of her mind, his attention is already back on Sam. “Anyway, I gotta borrow your boyfriend here, talk about some private family business.” He throws one last cocky grin over his shoulder. “But, uh, nice meeting you.”

Sam and Jess trade looks over Dean’s head, and in that moment Sam makes an important decision. Jess is family, or at least she will be if everything goes as well on Monday as he hopes it will. “No,” he tells his brother as he goes and puts an arm around Jess’s shoulders. “Whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of her.”

Dean looks a bit taken aback at being stood up to like this, but he manages to take it in stride. “Um,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “Dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”

“So he’s working overtime on a Miller Time shift,” Sam replies with a shrug. “He’ll stumble back in sooner or later.”

Dean glances at Jess, his expression one of supreme frustration, then he catches Sam’s eye and says with as much seriousness as he can muster, “Dad’s on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

And something about the way he says it makes Sam’s blood run cold. He should have known that Dean wouldn’t come all this way without a good reason, especially given the terms on which they had parted two years ago. “Jess, excuse us. We have to go outside.”

**********

Sam ducks back into his room just long enough to pull on jeans and a hoodie, then he follows Dean outside. “What were you thinking, Dean?” he can’t help but ask as soon as the front door closes behind them. “I mean, come on. You can’t just break in, middle of the night, and expect me to hit the road with you.”

“You’re not hearing me, Sammy.” Dean is taking the stairs two at a time. “Dad’s missing. I need you to help me find him.”

Sam grimaces at the nickname. “You remember the poltergeist in Amherst? Or the Devil’s Gates in Clifton? He was missing then, too. He’s always missing, and he’s always fine.” It had been the story of their childhood, in fact—their father leaving him and Dean on their own in out-of-the-way hotel rooms for weeks at a time while he was off on a hunt. Only this time, strangely enough, he was the one reassuring his brother that Dad would be back soon. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

“Not for this long.” There is real worry in Dean’s voice for a moment. “Now, are you coming with me or not?”

“I’m not.” Sam knows his brother came here with good reason, but he just can’t. He has a life of his own now, and a future, and he’s not about to throw all of that away.

“Why not?”

“I swore I was done hunting,” Sam reminds him. “For good.”

“Oh, come on,” Dean scoffs. “It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad.”

Sam just rolls his eyes. Dean has never seen the way they were raised in the same light that he does. “Oh, yeah? When I told Dad I was scared of the thing in the closet, he gave me a .45!”

Dean stops at this and turns to Sam with a puzzled frown. “Well, what was he supposed to do?”

“I was nine years old! He was supposed to say, ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’.”

“‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’? Are you kidding?” Disgusted, Dean turns back to the stairs. “You know what’s out there.” He takes the last few stairs in two strides and pushes out the door into the parking lot.

With a sigh, Sam follows. He knows now what’s out there in the dark, but Dean always forgets that, unlike him, Sam didn’t always know. Dean was old enough when their mother died to remember what had happened to her, and to learn about all the evil things in the world directly from their father, but he and their dad had both tried to keep the truth from Sam for as long as possible. Sam doesn’t envy Dean his lack of a childhood, but he does resent the fact that Dean and Dad tried to give him one when they knew that one day it would have to be ripped away from him like an old bandaid.

“So what are you gonna do?” Dean asks, breaking the silence and derailing Sam’s train of thought. “You’re just gonna live some normal, apple-pie life? Is that it?”

“No. Not normal. Safe.” He can never be normal, Sam is sure, but he can pretend, and he can keep the people he cares about from knowing what’s out there in the dark.

“And that’s why you ran away,” Dean says.

It’s the beginning of the same old argument, the one that had driven such a deep wedge between them the last time Dean had come to visit. With a sigh of resignation, Sam says the same thing he told his brother two years ago. “I was just going to college, Dean. It was Dad who said if I was gonna go I should stay gone. And that’s what I’m doing.” The last thing Sam wants is to see his father again. The pain and anger left behind from their last fight is still an open wound, and Sam is sure Dean knows it.

But he doesn’t try to reconcile them in absentia this time, much to Sam’s surprise. All he says is, “Yeah, well, Dad’s in real trouble right now, if he’s not dead already. I can feel it.” There is genuine fear in his voice, a fear that Sam can’t ignore. “I can’t do this alone.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to.”

And that’s a plea that Sam can’t ignore. He’s not being asked to do this for Dad any more; he’s being asked to do it for Dean. And that’s a request he’s willing to consider. Despite their differences, Dean has always been there for him, and it’s time he returned the favor.

“What was he hunting?”

****************************************************************************************************************************************

**November 2, 2005**

“Call me if you find him?” Sam asks as he grabs his duffel bag out of the back seat and gets out of the Impala. Dean nods, but doesn’t look at him. “And maybe I can meet up with you later, huh?”

“Yeah, all right,” Dean says dismissively. Sam can tell he’s disappointed that his brother isn’t seeing the search for Dad through with him, but there’s not much Sam can do about it. His interview is only a few hours away, and as fun as the last few days have been, he’s not going to give up his entire future, not even for Dean. Saying so isn’t going to make either of them feel better, though, so he just taps the car’s roof in farewell and turns to go.

“Sam?”

At the sound of his name, Sam turns back to the Impala.

“You know, we made a hell of a team back there,” Dean says.

“Yeah,” Sam replies with a smile, then he watches as Dean drives off into the night. They had made a hell of a team, hunting down that Woman in White, and he can’t deny that a part of him had enjoyed doing research and tracking down a monster again. And working a case with Dean, without their father there to critique their every move, had made the hunt more enjoyable and more rewarding than he had expected it to be. But that isn’t his life any more, and, more importantly, he doesn’t want it to be. His future is here, with Jess, not out on the road with his brother.

Sam smiles again as soon as he opens the door to the apartment. The place smells like fresh-baked cookies, and, sure enough, he finds a plate of them waiting for him in the kitchen, along with a note that says ‘Welcome Home!’ Taking this as a sign that he has been forgiven for leaving for the weekend without a good explanation, Sam grabs a cookie and heads for the bedroom.

Jess isn’t there, but Sam can hear the shower running in the bathroom. Taking a bite of the cookie, he tosses his duffle into a corner of the room and flops down onto his back on the bed with a contented sigh. It’s good to be home. Maybe he’ll join Jess in the shower if he can convince his sore and tired body to get up again; right now, though, he can’t even keep his eyes open…

A drop of something warm and wet falls on Sam’s face, then another. As he lifts a hand up to his forehead to wipe them away, he opens his eyes and looks up at the ceiling, searching for the source of the leak. Then, his entire body goes numb in horror.

Jess is pinned to the ceiling by some invisible force, limbs splayed out, terror on her face. A deep gash across her stomach is staining her nightgown red and dripping blood down onto Sam’s face. As Sam’s eyes meet hers, her mouth opens, silently screaming his name. Then, the ceiling around her bursts into flames.

Too horrified by what he is seeing to move, Sam can do nothing but scream. “Jess! No!” This has to be a dream. He’ll wake up any second now, just like all the other times…

“Sam!”

Dean’s voice shouts across the roar of the fire that is consuming the room. He freezes in the doorway for a second, looking up at Jess’s body on the ceiling being consumed by fire, but he manages to tear his gaze away and lunges for his brother. He drags Sam off the bed and wrestles him towards the door, ignoring Sam’s struggles and his cries of “Jess! No!” as he watches his future being consumed by fire.

The entire building is being evacuated, and someone has already called 911, so, in the confusion, Dean is able to get a distraught Sam to the Impala and leave him there while he goes back to watch the police and the firemen work. He lingers around the scene just long enough to make sure that no one is mentioning seeing Sam returning just before the fire, or talking as if he is a suspect in any way, then he returns to the car.

Sam is standing behind the car with the trunk open, loading a shotgun. He looks up at Dean with angry, grief-stricken eyes. They both know what has just happened, and what they have to do. Sam tosses the shotgun into the trunk and slams it with a grimace of determination.

“We’ve got work to do.”


	2. Something Wicked

“Lock the doors and windows and close the shades. And most important…”

“Watch out for Sammy,” Dean replies automatically as he glances over his shoulder at his little brother. Sammy is sitting in a battered old recliner in front of the hotel room’s TV, staring resolutely at the cartoon on the screen and pretending not to notice that Dad is leaving again. “I know.” Dean tries to stand a little taller as he turns back to his father.

“All right. And if something tries to bust in?”

“Shoot first, ask questions later.” Dean looks his father in the eyes after a brief glance towards the loaded shotgun sitting by the bedroom door.

“That’s my man,” Dad says, clapping him on the shoulder before picking up his duffle bag and turning to go. The flash of pride in his eyes makes his departure a little easier, Dean thinks as he locks the door behind his father, but not much.

As soon as he’s heard the Impala pull out of the hotel parking lot, Dean turns back to the room and approaches Sammy. His little brother didn’t cry and cling to their dad as he left this time, but his silence is almost worse. Dean can see tears in his eyes.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says as brightly as he can manage. “There room for me in that chair too?”

Sammy doesn’t look at his brother, but he does scoot over to make room for Dean in the big chair. With a genuine smile, Dean sits down next to his little brother and puts a comforting arm around his shoulders. “Don’t worry, Sammy. Dad’ll be home before you know it, and I’m always here. I’ll take care of you.” Sammy doesn’t say anything to this, but he lays his head back on Dean’s arm and relaxes, then swipes one tiny fist across his eyes before turning his full attention back to the TV.

The two of them watch cartoons until Sammy’s stomach starts rumbling, then Dean makes a can of chicken soup for dinner. After dinner, he gives Sammy a bath, then tucks him into bed and reads to him from a book of fairytales he had brought home from the school library until he’s sound asleep. After cleaning up the dinner dishes, Dean crawls into the hotel room’s other bed and reads to himself until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.

The one good thing about Dad being gone is that he gets a bed all to himself. But when he wakes up from a bad dream in the middle of the night to find Sammy curled up under the covers next to him—probably because of his own bad dream—he just wraps his arms around his little brother and closes his eyes again. Though Sammy’s too young to know it yet, Dean needs him just as much as he needs Dean. They take care of each other, and Dean hopes that won’t ever change. 


	3. Bugs

“Well, it’s been a pleasure, boys,” Dean says with a grin as he scoops the stack of bills from the green felt and stuffs them in his pocket, “but I’m afraid that’s all the fun I have time for tonight.” He downs the last of his beer with a flourish, his eyes never leaving the faces of the four men who are scowling at him from across the pool table. “Don’t worry; next time I’m passing through, I’ll make sure to stop in and give you a chance to win your money back.” He’s bracing himself for a fight as he backs towards the door, but just as the men decide to take their chances with the bouncer, a rowdy group of bikers shoves their way into the roadhouse, giving Dean a chance to disappear into the crowd.

He’s been hustling pool since he was big enough to see over the table, but it still gives him a rush to take on four guys like that and walk away without a scratch. He pulls the wad of bills out of his pocket as he makes his way through the crowd of bikers and out the door and thumbs through it: almost eight hundred dollars. That’s at least a week of room and board, more if they find the right job.

They. The word has a nice ring to it. Dean’s grin widens as he looks out across the parking lot to where he left the Impala. Sam is reclining on the hood, his back against the windshield, his long legs resting on her bumper, reading a newspaper. It’s almost like he never left, Dean thinks, and despite the circumstances that brought them back together, Dean couldn’t be happier to have his little brother back on the hunt with him.

Sam looks up as Dean bounds down the roadhouse steps, waving the bills, and, as usual, is not as impressed by Dean’s accomplishment as Dean is hoping he will be. “You know, we could get day jobs every once in a while.”

Dean makes a face at his brother’s buzzkill of a mood. “Hunting’s our day job. And the pay is crap.”

“Yeah, but… hustling pool? Credit card scams? It’s not the most honest thing in the world, Dean.”

Dean resists the urge to make a face at his brother. “Well, let’s see,” he says. “Honest.” He holds out his empty hand. “Fun and easy.” He holds out the hand full of money, waving it in Sam’s face again just to prove his point. “It’s no contest. Besides, we’re good at it. It’s what we were raised to do.”

Sam’s smile at this is only slightly condescending. “Yeah, well, the way we were raised was jacked.”

College boy might have a point, but there’s no way Dean’s going to admit it. “Yeah, says you.” He glances pointedly at the newspaper in Sam’s hands instead as he finishes counting his winnings and slips them into his pocket. “We got a new gig, or what?”


	4. Playthings

The scene inside the lawyer’s hotel room had been much less gruesome than most of the deaths Dean has seen, especially recently. The cops assumed the man had hung himself, but Dean can tell that Susan is suspicious of all the ‘bad luck’ the hotel is having in its final days. It mirrors his own suspicions—he just has to find some way to talk to Susan’s mother, and then he’ll have his answers, he’s sure. Hopefully Sam has found the evidence they need to confront the old witch and stop this before anyone else dies.

Their room is dark when Dean enters, and Sam has left the door open and the key in the lock. Dean would lecture him, but there are more important things to talk about at the moment. “There’s been another one,” he says in the direction of Sam’s silhouette sitting in the chair by the window. “Some guy just hung himself in his room.”

“Yeah, I saw,” Sam replies woodenly.

“We gotta figure this out, and fast.” Dean crosses to his bed and openes his duffel to inventory their supplies. “What’d you find out about Granny?”

“You’re bossy.”

Sam’s reply stops Dean short. “What?” He turns to look at his brother.

“You’re bossy,” Sam repeats, slurring the words slightly and shrugging. “And short.” He laughs as he looks Dean up and down with unfocussed eyes.

“Are you drunk?” Dean can hardly believe what he’s hearing, or seeing.

“Yeah. So?”Sam sneers back. “Stupid.” The last is said just under his breath, but Dean still hears it.

Dean glances towards the liquor bottles on the vanity bar in the corner of the room. They’re all empty, as are the two sitting on the floor by Sam’s chair, and the one in his hands is almost there too. “Dude, what are you thinking? We’re working a case!”

And just like that, Sam’s snarky attitude vanishes. He slumps down in his chair and stares vacantly out the window. “That guy who hung himself… I couldn’t save him,” he says thickly, sounding near tears.

“What are you talking about?” Dean asks. “You didn’t know, you couldn’t have done anything.” They hadn’t even known the guy was in the hotel, much less that he’d be the witch’s next target.

“That’s an excuse, Dean!” Sam looks up at his brother with tear-bright eyes. “I should have found a way to save him. I should have saved Ava too.”

So that’s what this is really about. Dean had known that Sam’s practical, get-the-job-done attitude when he’d found this case had been too normal to be… well, normal. Sam has been burying the guilt that he’s feeling over what happened to that psychic girl who’d disappeared, and, not unexpectedly, wasn’t able to keep it down forever. “Yeah, well, you can’t save everyone,” he reminds Sam. “Even you said that.”

Sam is too far gone with liquor and guilt to listen to logic, though, even when it’s his own. He slams his unbroken hand on the table and shouts, “No, Dean! You don’t understand, all right? The more people I save, the more I can change!”

He’s right; Dean doesn’t understand. “Change what?”

“My destiny, Dean!”

This again. Dean doesn’t want to have this conversation any more, especially with Sam so drunk that he probably won’t remember it in the morning. “All right, time for bed,” he says as he reaches down and hauls Sam to his feet. “Come on, Sasquatch.”

“I need you to watch out for me,” Sam babbles as he stumbles upright.

Dean puts his hands on Sam’s shoulders to steer him towards the bed. “Yeah, I always do.”

“No!” Sam shrugs off Dean’s help and turns to face him. “No, no, no. You have to Watch Out for me, all right? And if I ever… turn into something that I’m not…” He chokes up for a second, tears welling in his eyes, then forces out the words that Dean knows are coming. “…You have to kill me.”

Dean just shakes his head. “Sam…”

Sam interrupts him with a shove that barely shakes him but almost makes Sam fall over. “Dean! Dad told you to do it! You have to!”

His brother’s drunken desperation is the only thing keeping Dean’s rage at bay. “Yeah, well, Dad’s an ass,” he shoots back, causing Sam to blink at him in surprise and confusion. “He never should have said anything. I mean… you don’t do that, you don’t lay that kind of crap on your kids.” It still hurts that the last words his father ever said to him were as good as an order to kill his little brother. It hurts in ways Sam will never know or understand.

Unfortunately, Sam’s misplaced loyalty to their father and his fear of what those orders could mean have blinded him to Dean’s pain. “No!” he replies. “He was right to say it! Who knows what I might become? Even now, everyone around me dies!”

“Yeah, well, I’m not dying, okay?” Dean shoots back. “And neither are you. Come on, Sam.” He grabs Sam’s shirt and pushes him, gently but firmly, into a sitting position on the bed, but when he tries to get him to lie down, Sam grabs his arm and will not move.

“No, please,” he begs, near tears again. “Dean, you’re the only one who can do it. Promise.”

“Don’t ask that of me,” Dean begs in return, trying to pull away.

“Dean, please. You have to promise me.”

Sam is drunk, Dean has to remind himself. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, and he likely won’t remember it in the morning, so there’s no reason not to tell him what he wants to hear. “I promise,” he finally says, just to end the conversation.

It nearly breaks his heart to see that that is exactly what his brother needs to hear. “Thanks,” Sam says as he slumps with obvious relief, then he reaches up, grabs Dean’s face with both hands, and looks him straight in the eyes. “Thank you.”

“All right, come on.” Dean grabs his brother’s arms and encourages Sam to lie down on the bed, which he finally does, falling first onto his back, then rolling over onto his stomach and planting his face in the pillow while hugging it with both arms. With a sigh of relief and released emotion, Dean slumps into a sitting position on his own bed, wishing that Sammy had left him some of the liquor. He could really use a drink right about now.


	5. Nightshifter

The phone in the hallway outside the vault is ringing. Dean knows he should just let it ring, that nothing he has to say to the cops or that the cops have to say to him will end this any sooner, or with any less trouble for him and Sam, but his head is starting to ache, and he just wants the noise to stop. As he picks up the handset, he has to stomp down a sudden hysterical urge to just tell them the truth about the shapeshifter and see what they say. “Yeah?”

“This is Special Agent Victor Henriksen,” the voice on the other end of the line says.

Special Agent sounds important, but Dean can’t bring himself to care. He just wants to get off the phone as quickly as possible in case Sam calls again. “Yeah, listen, I’m not really in the negotiating mood right now, so…”

Special Agent Victor Henriksen interrupts him before he can hit his stride. “Good. Me neither,” he says in clipped, precise tones. “It’s my job to bring you in. Alive’s a bonus, but not necessary.”

That sends an unexpected chill down Dean’s spine. Crap. This guy’s not a cop; he’s a Fed. “Woah. Kinda harsh for a federal agent, don’t you think?” he says, trying to hide his sudden fear behind the cocky bravado that’s gotten him this far in life.

“Well, you’re not the typical suspect, are you, Dean?”

That unexpected chill turns to full-on ice water running through his veins. How does this Fed know his name? He opens his mouth to deny it, but Henriksen isn’t waiting for him to say anything. “I want you and Sam out here, unarmed. Or we come in. And, yes, I know about Sam too. Bonnie to your Clyde.”

The image that reference conjures in his head makes Dean grin and temporarily tamps down the terror that is making his heart race. “Yeah, well, that part’s true,” he quips, “but how’d you even know we were here?”

“Go screw yourself, that’s how I knew,” Henriksen says dismissively. “It’s become my job to know about you, Dean. I’ve been looking for you for weeks now. I know about the murder in St. Louis. I know about the Houdini act you pulled in Baltimore. I know about the desecrations and the thefts. I know about your dad.”

He can accept the FBI knowing about the rest of it—his police records are no big secret, not after their last few run-ins with the cops—but there is one thing Dean isn’t going to accept. “You don’t know crap about my dad,” he shoots back at the agent, not even trying to hide his anger behind humor or bravado.

“Ex-marine, raised his kids on the road,” Henriksen replies, as if reading from a file. “Cheap motels, backwoods cabins. Real paramilitary survivalist type. I just can’t get a handle on what type of whacko he was. White supremacist, Timothy McVeigh, to-may-to, to-mah-to.”

Dean is right—the man knows nothing of substance about his father—but the agent’s mischaracterization of John as a backwoods neo-Nazi looney only makes him angrier. “You got no right talking about my dad like that,” he almost shouts into the phone. “He was a hero.” A part of his brain is telling him that the man is just trying to get him angry, but he tells it to shut up. He doesn’t care; he’s still the one in control here for the moment.

“Yeah, right. Sure sounds like it.” Henriksen dismisses Dean’s defense of his father with a bored tone in his voice. “You have one hour to make a decision or we come through those doors, full-automatic.” Then, he hangs up the phone.

Okay, so, maybe not in full control, or at least not for much longer. Because if Dean is sure of anything, he is sure that Henriksen isn’t going to be giving him an hour. He’ll be lucky if the man gives him five minutes. He does his best not to slam the phone’s handset down hard enough to break it, then stalks off in the direction of the bank lobby to find Sam. 


	6. A Very Supernatural Christmas

**Christmas Eve, 1991**

“What’s that?”

Sam looks up at his brother from where he’s kneeling in front of the hotel’s threadbare, hideously orange sofa, wrapping something in newspaper. “A present for Dad.”

Crap _._ Despite the holiday specials on TV and the snow and the lights hanging on everything, Dean has forgotten that tomorrow is Christmas. “Yeah, right,” he scoffs at Sam to hide his surprise. “Where’d you get the money? Steal it?”

“No,” Sam replies indignantly. “Uncle Bobby gave it to me to give to him. Said it was real special.”

Dean’s mind is racing. Should he have gotten Dad something too? The only Christmas presents either of them had given their father before had been handmade ornaments from school, which always seemed to get left behind whenever they moved on to a new town. He doesn’t even know what he would get Dad if he had money. Bullets, maybe, or a knife? “What is it?” he asks Sam, hoping for inspiration to strike.

“A pony,” Sam replies sarcastically as he puts another piece of tape on the wad of newspaper.

“Very funny.” It’s probably something silly, anyway. Only kids care about Christmas. Dad isn’t gonna care if Sam gets him a present and Dean doesn’t. He turns away from the window, sits down on the couch next to Sam, and picks up an old “Hot Rod” magazine. Watching for Dad isn’t going to make him show up any sooner.

“Dad’s gonna be here, right?”

“He’ll be here,” Dean promises without thinking about it. He doesn’t know if it’s true, but he can’t let Sam know that.

“It’s Christmas,” Sam says, as if invoking the holiday will make their father appear out of thin air.

“He knows, and he’ll be here,” Dean replies with as much sincerity as he can muster. “Promise.” He hopes he’s right, but given that Dad hadn’t even mentioned being back for Christmas, Sam’s every word is making him less certain.

The promise sticks, though, as it always does, and Sam returns to his wrapping project. Dean goes back to his magazine, hoping for some peace and quiet now, but the floodgates have been opened. “Where is he, anyway?” Sam asks for what seems like the thousandth time.

Dean answers by rote, not even bothering to look up. “On business.”

“What kind of business?”

“You know that. He sells stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Stuff,” Dean says with an irritated shrug.

“Nobody ever tells me anything,” Sam mutters under his breath.

“Then quit asking!” That comes out a bit nastier than Dean had meant it to. To avoid Sam’s hurt glare, he gets up off the couch and goes to sit on his bed, shoving empty soda cans and fast food wrappers to the floor to make room. He didn’t mean it to come out that way; he’s just really starting to hate lying to his little brother. Sam has been asking the same questions over and over ever since he started talking, and getting less accepting of the answers every time. And Sammy’s smart—too smart for his own good, probably. He’s gonna figure everything out eventually. But orders are orders, so all Dean can do is beg him to stop asking and hope that some day he’ll actually listen.

But today is obviously not that day. “Is Dad a spy?”

The question is so absurd that Dean has to look up to see if his brother is making fun of him, but Sam’s earnest curiosity is all too sincere. “Mm-hmm, he’s James Bond.” Sam glares at him for this, then changes tactics.

“Why do we move around so much?”

“‘Cause everywhere we go, they get sick of your face,” Dean snaps as he returns to his magazine. Can’t the kid take a hint?

At a thud, he looks up to see that Sam has jumped over the couch and is now standing at the foot of the bed, looking frustrated. “I’m old enough, Dean,” he pleads. “You can tell me the truth.”

Dean wants to—and not just because it would finally shut Sam up—but he can’t disobey Dad, and if he tells Sam that Dad doesn’t want him to know, Sam will just start fights with Dad and get in trouble. “You don’t wanna know the truth,” he says, begging Sammy to listen to him for once. “Believe me.”

“Is that why we never talk about… Mom?”

And with that one word, Dean’s frustration with his little brother becomes full-on anger. “Shut up!” he shouts at Sam, standing up and tossing the magazine down on the bed. “Don’t you ever talk about Mom. Ever!” Sammy doesn’t know how good he has it. Dean wishes every day that he didn’t know the truth, that he didn’t remember having a mother who loved him, and a father who came home from work every night, and a place that he could call home… Suddenly, this dingy hotel room feels like a prison. He needs some fresh air, and a break from Sam and all of his stupid questions. He grabs his jacket and heads for the door.

“Wait,” Sam pleads as Dean shoves past him. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” Dean replies, trying to ignore the tears welling in his little brother’s eyes as he slams the door behind him.

**********

Dean walks the streets of the town their dad has left them in—it’s somewhere in Nebraska, but he can’t remember the name—until well after dark, trying hard not to think about Sammy and his questions. He knows he shouldn’t have gotten angry at Sam for asking about Mom. Dad used to get angry at Sam for asking questions, used to yell at him and make him cry, and Dean always hated when he did that. Sam can’t help being curious; the kid’s too damn smart for his own good, and a hell of a lot smarter than Dad gives him credit for. He supposes the answer could be just to ignore him when he asks the questions Dean can’t answer, like Dad does now, but that’s almost worse than the yelling. Dean doesn’t ever want Sam to think he can’t talk to his big brother about anything, even if it means always having to repeat himself and occasionally getting angry at the kid for no reason.

Dean doesn’t even think about dinner until after the sun has gone down, and then he curses himself again for forgetting that it’s Christmas Eve, because he had wanted to bring back a nice dinner for Sam to make up for shouting at him, but all the shops and restaurants in this worthless little town have closed early for the holiday. The only store he can find that is still open is the gas station down by the highway. The bored teenager behind the counter gives him an odd look as he piles beef jerky, Funyons, soda, and Twinkies on the counter, but he doesn’t say anything as he bags up the junk food and hands over the change. The look makes Dean’s shoulder-blades itch as he walks out of the store, but when he makes it back to the hotel without being stopped by any cops or concerned citizens asking him where his parents are, the itch vanishes.

Sam is sitting on the couch reading a comic book when Dean comes in. “Thought you went out,” he says in a voice that Dean can tell means he didn’t expect him to come back.

A bit stung by the implied accusation, Dean replies, “Yeah, to get you dinner.” He tosses Sam a packet of beef jerky, followed by a bag of Funyons. “Don’t forget your vegetables.” Sam catches them without comment, then watches Dean as he goes over to his bed, pulls a can of soda out of the bag, and takes off his jacket.

Abandoning the snacks, Sam gets up off the couch and crosses the room to sit down on his own bed across from Dean. He watches him open the soda, then says, “I know why you keep a gun under your pillow.”

Dean’s heart skips a beat. He wants to deny it, but his hand has already lifted the pillow on his bed, just to make sure the gun is still there. “No, you don’t,” he says in the calmest tone he can manage at the moment. “Stay outta my stuff.”

Sam shrugs, unfazed. “And I know why we lay salt down everywhere we go.”

He’s looking a little too certain of this for Dean’s comfort. “No, you don’t. Shut up.” He tries not to shout, but his heart starts pounding as he watches Sam lean over the far side of his bed and pull something out from under the mattress.

It’s Dad’s journal. Sam tosses it onto the bedside table and looks up defiantly, daring Dean to deny anything now. “Where’d you get that?” Dean asks, realizing even as he says it that he’s on his feet. “That’s Dad’s! He’s gonna kick your ass for reading that!” More like kick both their asses, and Dean knows he’ll get the worst of it for letting Sammy find the book in the first place.

“Are monsters real?”

Dean’s first response, like always, is to deny it. “What? You’re crazy.”

Sam just gives him a look that says that he knows Dean is lying. “Tell me.” His expression is defiant, but his voice quavers a bit on the last word, and Dean suddenly realizes that Sam knows everything, and behind his cocky declarations of understanding, his little brother is terrified. This isn’t how Dean had wanted him to find out about all the terrible stuff in the world, but it’s too late to take it back now, and lying to Sam will only make things worse. There’s just one condition that has to be agreed upon first. “I swear, if you ever tell Dad I told you any of this, I will end you.”

“Promise.”

Dean sits back down on his bed, wracking his brain for a place to start that will reassure Sam instead of scaring him further. As Sam leans forward, eager for answers, Dean’s eye falls on the comic book sitting next to Sam on the bed.

“Well, the first thing you have to know is, we have the coolest dad in the world. He’s a superhero.”

“He is?” Sam’s eyes light up at the word.

“Yeah,” Dean says with a grin. “Monsters are real. Dad fights them. He’s fighting them right now.”

“But… Dad said the monsters under my bed weren’t real.” Sam looks slightly betrayed by this revelation.

“That’s because he had already checked under there,” Dean reassures him lightly, though his heart breaks a little at the sudden realization that he is now the one responsible for the loss of Sam’s childhood innocence and belief that the world is a safe and decent place. “But, yeah, they’re real. Almost everything’s real.”

“Is Santa real?”

Dean is surprised that years of forgotten Christmases and crappy presents haven’t already cost Sam his belief in Santa, but he wants to be honest about everything right now. “No,” he says with a sad smile, shaking his head.

Sam’s face falls at this, then he starts to look worried. “If monsters are real,” he says, looking up at Dean, “then they could get us. They could get me.”

“Dad’s not gonna let them get you,” Dean says, though the reassurance rings hollow in his own ears. Trust Sam to immediately voice his own deepest fear, the one that he can never share with anyone, no matter how many sleepless nights it causes him…

“But what if they get him?”

Make that second deepest fear. Because the only thing worse than imagining the monsters coming for him and Sam is wondering what he’d do if Dad left one day and never came back. Now was not the time to be thinking about his own fears, though; not if he wanted Sammy to be okay with the whole ‘monsters exist, Dad hunts them’ thing. “They aren’t gonna get Dad,” he says with all the big-brother authority he can muster. “Dad’s, like, the best.”

Sam ponders this for a second, then looks away. “I read in Dad’s book that… that they got Mom.”

He looks up at Dean, as if expecting him to get angry again, but Dean can’t get mad at him for mentioning Mom now—and maybe not ever again. “It’s complicated, Sam,” is all he can say, though. Telling Sam the truth about Mom now will only tear down the image of Dad as their infallible protector, and he can’t do that now.

But Sam isn’t going to be satisfied with evasions. “If they can get Mom, they can get Dad, and if they get Dad, they can get us,” he blurts out in a rush of barely-suppressed panic. It makes Dean’s own heart rate leap in sympathetic anxiety. He gets up and sits down on the other bed next to Sam, using the motion to hide his spike of fear and bring his emotions back under control.

“It’s not like that, okay?” He puts a reassuring arm around his little brother’s trembling shoulders. “Dad’s fine. We’re fine. Trust me.” Sam looks up at him briefly, then turns away. There are tears in his eyes, and he doesn’t look the least bit reassured, but Dean doesn’t know what else to say. “You okay?” he asks, even though he already knows what the answer will be.

“Yeah.” Sam pulls away from him.

It’s Christmas Eve, and instead of filling his little brother’s head with stories of a jolly old man who brings presents to good boys and girls, Dean is shattering all of Sam’s childhood fantasies and telling him that monsters are real. He’s probably the worst big brother in the world, but he has to do something to salvage this disaster of a day for Sam. He puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder before he can turn away. “Dad’s gonna be here for Christmas. Just like he always is.” He isn’t sure if that’s a lie or a promise, but it’s all he has left.

Unfortunately, it isn’t enough. Sam shrugs off Dean’s hand and pulls away from him completely. “I just wanna go to sleep, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Dean watches as his little brother lies down on top of the covers, still fully dressed, and curls up on his side. Sam’s shoulders are shaking with suppressed sobs and his eyes are brimming with tears. Dean wants to tuck Sam into bed, to climb in with him and wrap his arms around him and tell him everything’s gonna be all right, just like he did when they were little, but they’re both too old for that now. All he can do is offer the only words of comfort he can muster. “It’ll all be better when you wake up,” he promises hollowly, swallowing a lump in his throat as he watches the tears begin to spill from Sam’s eyes. “You’ll see. Promise.”

**********

It’s past midnight when the snow starts to fall. Sam cried himself to sleep hours ago, but Dean is still awake, sitting at the window and watching for Dad. As the minutes slip by, he is becoming more and more certain that their father will not make it home in time for Christmas. Dean wants to get angry at him for that, but he can’t; he’s too consumed with dread over having to face Sam’s disappointment in the morning. Even worse, there’s a good chance that Sammy won’t even be disappointed, that he’ll just see Dad’s absence as further proof of the cruelty of the real world. And hasn’t the kid lost enough of his innocence for one day—especially today, of all days? Dean deeply regrets telling Sam that Santa isn’t real; if he’d let the kid hold on to that one fiction, maybe he could have given him something good to believe in on Christmas morning…

But it’s not Santa that Sam needs to believe in right now; it’s Dad. And in equating the two inside his mind, Dean suddenly gets an idea so brilliant that he grins in spite of himself. Santa or not, Dad or not, Sam is going to have the Christmas he deserves. Pulling on his jacket, Dean slips silently out of the hotel room and heads for the nearest house covered in twinkling lights.

**********

It’s still dark outside, but Dean can’t take the anticipation any more. He tiptoes over to Sam’s bed and gently shakes him. “Sam, wake up!” Sam rolls over, blinking sleepily at his brother. “Dad was here,” Dean says with a grin and a gesture towards the couch. “Look what he brought!”

Sam sits up, yawning and rubbing his eyes, and looks where Dean is pointing. A little Christmas tree decorated with glass balls and colored lights is sitting on the table by the couch, and next to it is a small pile of packages wrapped in festive paper. Dean’s grin widens as Sam’s eyes light up. “Dad was here?”

“Yeah.” He lies easily this time. “Look at this. We made a killing.”

“Why didn’t he try to wake me up?” Sam asks through a yawn.

Dean shrugs. “He tried to, like, a thousand times.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Did I tell you he would give us Christmas or what?” Sam nods, not looking anywhere but at the tree. “Go on, dive in,” Dean says.

Sam doesn’t need to be told twice. He jumps off the bed and practically runs to the Christmas tree. Up close, it’s obvious that the tree is barely more than a branch, but he doesn’t seem to care. Dean hands him the two presents sitting next to the tree and they both sit down on the couch as Sam rips eagerly into the first one.

“What is it?” Dean asks excitedly when Sam stops halfway through tearing off the paper and stares in puzzlement at the package in his lap.

Sam pulls away the rest of the paper and holds up the present. It is a bright pink box containing a plastic doll in a sparkling blue dress. “Sapphire Barbie,” he says, sounding confused.

Oh, crap. Dean forces himself to laugh. “Dad probably thinks you’re a girl.”

“Shut up,” Sam says with a roll of his eyes as he tosses the doll away.

“Open that one.” Dean nods at the other present, hoping that he hasn’t made the same mistake twice. Sam rips eagerly into the small, thin package and pulls out a pink, sparkly baton with streamers on the ends.

“Dad never showed, did he?” Sam looks at Dean with disappointment as he drops the baton on the floor next to the Barbie doll.

Dean is feeling guilty as hell, but he has to try one last time to salvage his attempt at Christmas. “Yeah, he did, I swear,” he lies, though the words have none of his usual sincerity behind them.

And Sam knows it. “Dean…” He shakes his head in exasperation. “Where’d you get all this stuff?”

Dean hangs his head, not sure whether he’s more ashamed of lying to Sam about Dad or having to admit he stole the presents. “The nice house down the block,” he tells Sam. He had made sure it was a nice house, though; one with plenty of gifts beneath the tree. He wasn’t so heartless as to steal from someone with nothing. “I swear I didn’t know they were chick presents.” He laughs a little, trying to lighten the mood. Sam nods, but doesn’t laugh with him, or even smile, and Dean knows in that moment that this isn’t about the presents, or how he got them.

“Look, I’m sure Dad would have been here if he could.”

Sam responds to this, but not in the way Dean had hoped. “If he’s alive,” he says with a despairing shrug of his shoulders.

“Don’t say that,” Dean almost snaps. “Of course he’s alive. He’s Dad.”

Sam nods halfheartedly, still visibly unconvinced. Dean sighs and looks over at the stupid, scraggly pine branch he had torn off a tree in the park and decorated with stolen ornaments and lights. It had been the best he could come up with, but it still hadn’t been enough. He drops his gaze back to his hands, resisting the sudden urge to cry or throw the stupid tree across the room and wishing he knew what to say to make any of this better.

He looks up at the sound of rustling paper to see Sam holding a small package wrapped in newspaper out to him. It’s the present he was wrapping earlier; the one for Dad.

“Here, take this.”

Dean is so surprised that his first response is not well-thought-out. “No. No, that’s for Dad.”

Sam just shakes his head. “Dad lied to me. I want you to have it.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He doesn’t deserve a brother like Sam. No one deserves a brother like Sam, and Dean is already trying to figure out how to make all of this up to him as his fingers fumble with the tape that Sam went a little overboard with. Then the wrapping falls open, and he knows that he doesn’t need to do anything.

It’s a bronze amulet of a horned face, strung like a necklace on a black cord. Dean stares at it for a long moment before finally saying, in a voice that is not thick with emotion no matter what anybody says, “Thank you, Sam. I… I love it.” It’s the first real present, given without purpose or utility, that he can ever remember getting, and he knows as he slips it over his head and returns Sam’s genuine smile, that he will never take it off.


	7. What Is and What Should Never Be

Dean sinks onto the front steps and grins with pride at the freshly-mown lawn laid out in front of him before taking a long pull off of the bottle of his favorite beer that his mom had left on the porch. If only Sammy could see him now! That Djinn had known him better than he knew himself, apparently; who’d have thought he’d ever find something so apple-pie normal as mowing the lawn to be so satisfying?

Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that the lawn is in front of his childhood home, which he never expected to have any good memories of, and that he’s done it as a favor for his mother, who he definitely had never expected to see again. He still isn’t entirely sure he trusts the new reality that the Djinn has given him, but damned if he isn’t going to enjoy every second of it. The only thing missing—the only thing that would make this new life truly perfect—is…

Speak of the devil. The driver of the blue rental car that is just pulling up in front of the house is none other than his brother. And sitting in the passenger seat… “I don’t believe it,” Dean murmurs as he gets to his feet and heads for the sidewalk. The blonde woman stepping out of the car barely has time to register his presence before Dean has her in a rib-creaking hug that is probably just slightly inappropriate given that she’s Sam’s girlfriend, but he doesn’t care. “Jessica!”

She lets out a little squeak, and a breathless, “Good to see you too, Dean,” then, a few seconds later, “Can’t breathe.” Dean’s cheeks heat up a little and he laughs awkwardly as he lets her go and steps away. He can’t tell her that he’s just so glad to see her alive—no need to freak her out—so he turns instead to his brother, who has just finished unloading several suitcases out of the trunk of the car.

“Sammy!”

Sam is dressed like a Grade-A frat boy, complete with khakis, popped collar, and windbreaker, and he gives Dean a very odd look at the sound of his name. “Hey,” he says in response to the greeting. Something about him feels a little off, but Dean is too happy to pay much attention to it at the moment. “Look at you,” he exclaims, clapping his brother on the shoulder. “You’re with Jessica, it’s… I don’t believe it.” It really is too good to be true. Sam has the life he’d always wanted here; Dad’s mistakes, and Dean’s, have all been washed away.

“Yeah,” Sam says, giving Dean another odd look.

“Where’d you guys come from?” Dean asks a split second before remembering that he’s supposed to know all this already. Oh well, everyone else has been pretty forgiving of his ignorance; he’s sure Sam will be too. That’s why he doesn’t hesitate to interrupt Sam in the middle of saying, “We just flew in from Cailf—“ to fill in the blanks with, “California! Stanford, huh? Law school, I bet.” All his sins really have been forgiven.

Then Sam laughs, and it’s not the laugh that Dean is used to his brother giving him when he makes a fool of himself. It is brief, and condescending, and Dean is about to ask him what his problem is when Sam looks down at the half-full beer bottle still in Dean’s hand and says, “I see you started off Mom’s birthday with a bang, as usual.”

Dean is about to protest—why does everyone around here seem to think he has a drinking problem?—when what Sam said fully registers with him. “Wait. Mom’s birthday, that’s today?” He feels a surge of grief at the realization that he’s never actually know when his mother’s birthday was, or his dad’s either. The day she died was the only one his father had ever bothered to commemorate.

And his ignorance is apparently not as endearing to Sam as it has been to everyone else. “Yeah. Yeah, Dean, that’s today,” he says in the same condescending tone of voice. “That’s why we’re here. Don’t tell me you forgot.” Dean just shrugs and tries to look befuddled, then changes the subject and offers to help Sam carry the suitcases into the house. His brother refuses the offer, though, and as Dean watches Sam and Jess head towards the house, he begins to suspect that this world the Djinn has given him is not as perfect as it had first appeared.

**********

“Well, I’m beat. Ready to turn in?” Sam asks Jessica as soon as they have all said goodnight to their mother and watched her go up the stairs.

“Sure,” Jess agrees.

“Right.” Sam smiles awkwardly at Carmen and barely glances at Dean. “‘Night, guys.”

“Wait, wait a sec, wait a second,” Dean protests, seeing his chance to figure out what’s going on with his brother slipping away. “Come on, it’s not even nine o’clock yet. Let’s, uh…” he hesitates for a second, remembering that everyone seems to think he’s an alcoholic, but then realizes that he doesn’t know what else to suggest. “Let’s go have a drink or something.”

“Yeah, maybe another time,” Sam says with absolutely no enthusiasm.

Stung, Dean tries another tactic. “Come on, man. Look at us! We both have beautiful women on our arms. You’re engaged. Let’s go celebrate!” He claps Sam on the shoulder and feels his brother flinch at his touch. Sam’s smile reeks of barely-controlled tolerance, and silence descends on all four of them, heavy and awkward as Dean’s suggestion goes unaccepted.

Finally, Sam turns to look at Jess and Carmen in turn. “Guys, can you excuse us? I just want to talk to my brother for a sec.”

The women both agree and head towards the kitchen while Dean, after enduring another cringe-inducing condescending stare from Sam, follows his brother into the living room. “What?” he asks as soon as they are alone.

“Okay, what’s gotten into you?” Sam isn’t smiling any more; his expression is fluctuating between annoyance and genuine concern. It’s the closest he’s looked all night to the brother Dean remembers having.

“What do you mean?” Dean asks, playing dumb.

“I mean, this whole warm, fuzzy, ecstasy-trip thing.”

“I’m just happy for you, Sammy,” Dean says honestly, clapping his brother on the shoulder again.

Sam pulls away from it and takes a few steps back. “Yeah, right,” he says, sounding unconvinced. “And that’s another thing. Since when do you call me Sammy?” When Dean doesn’t have a good answer for this, Sam continues. “Dean, come on. We don’t talk outside of holidays.”

“We don’t?” Dean feels his stomach drop a little at the matter-of-fact way Sam says it. “Well, we should. I mean, you’re my brother.”

“‘You’re my brother’?” Sam says. “You know that’s what you said when you snaked my ATM card, or when you bailed at my graduation, or when you hooked up with Rachel Nave.”

Each one of those accusations, dropped from Sam’s lips as if they are well-rehearsed elements of a much longer list, feels like a punch in the gut. “Who?” is all Dean can think of to say when he finds Sam looking expectantly at him after the last one.

“My prom date. On prom night.”

Ouch. “Yeah, that does kinda sound like me,” Dean mutters under his breath. He’s starting to not like the picture of himself that he is getting from his brother. “Well, hey, man, I’m sorry about all that.” It’s not too late to fix this. The old Sam has forgiven him a lot worse.

But this Sam just pulls away, hands up when Dean tries to touch him again. “No, look, it’s all right, man. I… I just, uh, I don’t know, I… guess we just don’t really have anything in common, you know?”

And Dean knows that can’t be true. They’re brothers; he practically raised the kid. Sure, they fought like cats and dogs at times, but they had shared everything, and still do. Family is everything to them. How can this Sam not see that? As Sam turns to walk away, Dean knows he’s screwing all this up royally, but he has one last chance to figure out what’s going on with Sam, and he has to take it. “Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah,” he says, grabbing Sam’s arm as his brother brushes past him. “Yes, we do. Yes we do.”

“What?” Sam asks, pulling away again.

“Hunting,” Dean answers, because it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Hunting?” The word rolls off Sam’s tongue as if he’s never used it before. “I’ve never been hunting in my life, Dean.”

This is not his brother, Dean suddenly realizes. This is not the Sam that he carried out of a burning house twenty-three years ago, the little brother that has lived in his back pocket ever since, that he fed and clothed and kept safe while their dad was off hunting down the monster that had killed their mother. Their mom was alive, and that simple fact had changed not just their present and their future, but their past. Without a hunter for a father, he and Sam had grown up as normal kids, and had grown apart.

Sam is still looking at him expectantly, and he knows he has to say something that doesn’t sound crazy if he wants any chance of building the relationship with this version of his brother that he had with the version the Djinn has taken from him. “Yeah, well, then we should go some time,” he manages not to stammer. “I… I think you’d be great at it.”

Sam just nods, his expression vaguely concerned. “Get some rest,” is all he says, then he walks away and heads up the stairs to his room. Dean turns towards the front door, suddenly no longer as enamored by the world his wish has granted him.

**********

He’s glad it was all just a hallucination. He really is. But… everything is harder to face again, now that he’s out. He’d never thought, never even dreamed, that he could want a normal apple-pie life, but after getting so close to having one… he can see why it’s all Sam ever wanted, and as he watches his brother from across the room, Dean wonders if he has the strength to admit how close he was to staying.

“That was the hospital,” Sam says as he hangs up the phone and crosses the room to sit down on the end of the other bed. “Girl’s been stabilized. Good chance she’s gonna pull through.”

“That’s good,” Dean says distractedly. His eyes are still drawn to the ad in the magazine in his hands. Carmen, the model for his favorite beer, is smiling at him from the glossy page. How can it hurt so badly to lose something that wasn’t even real, that he’d never had in the first place?

“How about you?” Sam’s question breaks through his reverie. “You all right?”

Dean closes the magazine and tosses it onto the bed. “Yeah, I’m all right.” He hopes he sounds convincing. “You should have seen it, Sam,” he finds himself saying when Sam just sits there, looking concerned. “Our lives…” He beaks off, clears his throat, and tries to lighten the mood. “You were such a wussy.”

Sam laughs a little at that. “So, we didn’t get along then, huh?”

Damn the kid for being so freaking insightful all the time. “Nah,” Dean says, going for casual unconcern and, based on the look on Sam’s face, failing horribly.

“But I thought it was supposed to be this perfect fantasy?”

Dean shakes his head, glad himself for the reminder. “It wasn’t. It was just a wish. I wished for Mom to live. That Mom never died, we never went hunting, and you and me just never… you know.”

Sam’s smile is sad and his nod is understanding. “Yeah, well… I’m glad we do. And I’m glad you dug yourself out, Dean. Most people wouldn’t have had the strength, would’ve just stayed.”

“Yeah, lucky me.” And he supposes that if he was strong enough to leave all that behind, he’s strong enough for what he has to say next. “I gotta tell you though, man. You know, you had Jess, Mom was gonna have grandkids…” He breaks off the swallow the lump that is starting to form in his throat.

“Yeah, but… Dean… it wasn’t real.”

“I know, but… I wanted to stay.” Dean blinks away the tears that won’t stop threatening to fall and can’t bring himself to look at his brother. He had almost stayed, had almost left Sam to face the fucked-up mess that is their lives alone. He only hopes that Sam will understand why. “I wanted to stay so bad. I mean, ever since we lost Dad… all I can think about is how much this job’s cost us.” And how much it could still cost them, if Dad’s fears about Sam ever manifest themselves. “We’ve lost so much. We’ve sacrificed so much.” At least there, in the dream, he never would have lost anyone. He could have even turned that Sam around, gotten back the brother the wish had lost him. There, he had been facing a future of happiness, of normalcy. Here, all he could see for his future was uncertainty, pain, and loss. It was inevitable.

“But people are alive because of you.” Sam’s words bring him back to himself, but it’s the last thing Dean wants to hear. It was that realization, that people were alive because of him, that had led to him digging too deep into the dream the Djinn had constructed for him in the first place. It was because of those people that he had discovered the truth. He remembered the words that he had shouted to his father’s tombstone in the cemetery. _Why is it my job to save all these people? Why do we have to sacrifice everything, Dad?_ He snorts dismissively, realizing that he’s never going to get an answer to those questions, not from his father or anyone else.

“It’s worth it, Dean. It’s not fair, and… you know, it hurts like hell, but… It’s worth it.”

And maybe that’s not an answer, but it’s enough. Because Sam’s right, and, more importantly, it will all be worth it as long as he saves just one person. One very specific person. That was why he came back, after all. Not for all those other people, but for Sam.


	8. All Hell Breaks Loose

Sam could be sleeping.

When Dean had laid Sam on the bed of the abandoned house, he’d made sure that his eyes were closed and that his hands were placed lying atop one another across his stomach. He doesn’t know why he did it that way, but looking at Sam now he realizes that it’s the same way his brother lies when he’s sleeping. He could be sleeping now, and Dean could almost convince himself of that if he hadn’t felt his brother die in his arms only hours ago. If he didn’t still have Sam’s blood on his hands. Except he washed his hands. Maybe he’s just imagining that it’s still there, that it’s a stain that will never come off.

Sam is dead.

He knows it, but he still doesn’t believe it.

“Dean?”

He hadn’t heard a car, or footsteps, or anything. When he turns towards the door, Bobby is just there, holding a bucket of fried chicken. Dean knows he should be more alert; there could still be demons out there, and that kid who killed Sam could come back to finish off the witnesses. Dean almost hopes for that; he could use a little payback. Not that it would fix anything. He can’t bring himself to care, though; about his own safety or anything else.

“Brought you this back,” Bobby says as he sets the bucket of chicken down on the table in the other room.

“No thanks, I’m fine.” He doesn’t know why he bothers to say anything. The words come out as if from someone else’s mouth; he doesn’t even recognize the sound of his own voice.

“You should eat something.”

Bobby sounds entirely too cheerful, like he’s living in some other universe where Dean’s only reason for living isn’t currently lying on a bare, filthy mattress in front of him, as cold as ice and as pale as a porcelain doll. “I said I’m not hungry.” Dean knows that saying anything will just encourage Bobby to say something back, but he can’t seem to help himself. He turns away from Sam and heads for the table in the other room. He picks up a bottle of whiskey and takes a drink, trying to use it to tell his brain to shut up. At some point, it will start working… or maybe it will have the opposite effect. He can’t remember.

Bobby is standing there, staring at him. Dean knows he’s about to say something else, and wants to tell him to shut up, but the words just won’t come out. He flinches at the concern in the older man’s voice when he finally speaks.

“Dean… I hate to bring this up, I really do, but… Don’t you think it’s maybe time we… bury Sam?”

At least that question has an easy answer. “No.” But even thinking about what Bobby is asking him makes his legs start to shake. He manages to sit down without giving himself away, though… he thinks.

“We could… maybe…”

“What? Torch his corpse?” That sounds more like his voice, Dean thinks from a distant corner of his mind as he watches the harsh words fall from his mouth. “Not yet.” That is an ultimatum.

Bobby didn’t seem to get the memo, though. “I want you to come with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Dean, please…”

“Why don’t you cut me some slack?” He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, but he’s glad that they’re coming out without him having to think about them too hard.

“I just don’t think you should be alone, that’s all,” Bobby says. Dean knows he’s sincere, and sincerely worried, but he doesn’t care. And Bobby, to his credit, recognizes that after a moment. “And, I gotta admit, I could use your help. Somethin’ big is goin’ down. End of the world big.”

“Well, then let it end!”

His shout shakes the walls of the rickety house, and Bobby almost backs up a pace, his eyes wide. “You don’t mean that,” he says in a near-whisper.

“You don’t think so?” Dean is on his feet again, letting whatever part of his brain that’s keeping him from curling up into a quivering, sobbing ball on the floor do the talking for him. “You don’t think I’ve given enough? You don’t think I’ve paid enough? I’m done with it. All of it. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn around and get the hell out of here.” He hadn’t raised his voice for any of that, but when Bobby just stands there, not saying a word, his anger overflows again. “Go!” he shouts, shoving the other man backwards towards the door.

But Bobby doesn’t go; he just looks at Dean with such a painful, bereft expression on his face that Dean eventually has to choke out an “I’m sorry” just to stop the weight of the guilt that look is causing him from crushing him to the floor along with all the rest of the emotions he’s barely keeping a handle on. “I’m sorry. Please, just go.”

He turns away, unable to look at Bobby any more, and the silence falls heavy between them, but Bobby finally says, “You know where I’ll be.” Dean listens to the footsteps as they cross the room, listens to the door close behind the man who is the closest thing to family he has left, and listens to car tires on gravel fade into the distance. Once there is nothing left to listen to, he looks back at his little brother, still lying on the bed. The image blurs as tears start to fall.

Sam could be sleeping.

**********

Dean pulls a chair up next to the bed, sits down, and stares at his brother for a long time. Maybe he drinks, maybe he dozes off for a while, he doesn’t remember. All he knows is that at some point, he starts speaking. And it’s really him this time, not just his brain on autopilot.

“You know, when we were little—you couldn’t’ve been more than five—you just started asking questions. How come we didn’t have a mom? Why do we always have to move around? Where’d Dad go when he’d take off for days at a time?” He finds himself smiling as he remembers Sammy and his incessant questions, the ones he only ever asked his big brother, because Dean was the only one he trusted to give him the straight answers. “I remember I begged you, ‘Quit asking, Sammy. Man, you don’t want to know.’ I just wanted you to be a kid, just for a little while longer. I always tried to protect you… keep you safe… Dad didn’t even have to tell me. It was just always my responsibility, you know? It’s like I had one job… I had one job… and I screwed it up.”

The full weight of his failure hits him then. All his life, his job hasn’t been hunting, not really; it has been to look after Sammy. Their father had even traded his own life for Dean’s because he knew that Dean would do anything and everything to save Sam. No matter what Dad had said, Dean knows he was supposed to have saved Sam, not killed him. And now, he’s failed to do either. “I blew it,” he chokes out, tears streaming down his face. “And for that, I’m sorry. I guess that’s what I do, though. I let down the people I love. I let Dad down. And now, I guess I’m just supposed to let you down, too. But how can I? How am I supposed to live with that? What am I supposed to do, Sammy?” He wants an answer, but there’s no one to give him one. Not his father, not his brother… “What am I supposed to do?”

The words come out like a prayer, and he suddenly thinks of Sam’s confession several months back about praying every day. Whatever the demon had wanted his brother for, whatever darkness Dad believed was hiding inside Sam’s soul, Dean knows otherwise. His brother was light, and goodness, and life itself; if anyone deserved to have their faith in God, or angels, or anything good and benevolent that might exist in this crap-hole of a world confirmed, it was Sam. So where is his miracle? Where’s his answer? Dean finds himself on his feet, screaming up at the sky, pleading for answers from a God he’s never believed in before. “What am I supposed to do?”

But there are no answers there, either, and never will be, and his faith vanishes as quickly as it had appeared. If he’s going to get Sam back, there’s only one power he can turn to, and he doesn’t even care now what it will cost him.


	9. Mystery Spot

“I’m supposed to wake up.”

He says that to himself every morning when he opens his eyes and Dean’s not there. It had started out as a heartbreaking plea back when he thought this all might be the result of the Trickster still messing with him, but now, after six months, it has become more of a mantra. He’s supposed to wake up, to keep going, to not wallow in grief and the thought of Dean burning in Hell. He’s supposed to wake up, to look ahead, to find a way to bring his brother back. Demons won’t talk to him, monsters don’t stand a chance against him, and his only goal any more is tracking down one near-invincible godlike creature and forcing it to send him back to that Wednesday when he’d lost his brother for real.

Bobby calls every few weeks, just to talk, to let Sam know that he’s keeping tabs on him. Sam lets every call go to voicemail, but he always listens to the messages. He knows he should go see Bobby, or talk to him at least—Bobby has been like a father to both him and Dean, and losing Dean hit him pretty hard too—but he can’t. He’s not strong enough to risk letting someone else in right now; if he lets Bobby in, if he gives himself a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on, he might start accepting that Dean is really gone, and as soon as he does that, Dean really will be gone. It’s better to stay away, to be alone, to hold on to his grief and his determination as the armor and the sword that he will use to save his brother from the Pit.

So he loses himself in routine instead. The Impala’s trunk is meticulously organized now, with a place for every weapon, and he keeps the car clean and running as smoothly as his brother did. Dean would be proud. He chooses a new town, a new hunt every week, rents out one-bed hotel rooms that he keeps as spotless and organized as the car. He cleans every gun he owns each night, and makes his bed with military-like precision every morning. He always orders dinner for two, though—a salad for him, and a burger for the empty spot across the table—and he can never brush his teeth in the morning without expecting to see his brother standing next to him at the sink, gargling mouthwash with a smirk on his face as if he was either going for the record or trying to see how long it will take this time to annoy his little brother into saying something. Sam never sets an alarm, but he wakes up every morning expecting to hear the radio playing Asia, and his heart always sinks when he sits up in silence in a hotel room with only one occupant.

He’d seen his brother die a thousand times, in a thousand different gruesome ways, but if the Trickster was trying to get him to accept that some day Dean was really going to be gone, that was the one lesson that he had not learned. Because no matter how many days go by, he is never going to stop opening his eyes expecting it to be Tuesday again, and he would watch Dean die a thousand more times if he could just be certain of seeing him once more.

So when the call comes—“Sam, it’s Bobby, I found him.”—he’s ready, and he will do anything, anything at all, to get his brother back.


	10. Jus In Bello

Henriksen isn’t usually the gloating type, but he’s going to make an exception, just this once. After all, this is the Winchesters he is patting himself on the back over; currently, the most notorious and elusive members of the FBI’s Most Wanted. Or, at least, they had been. Now, they’re just two more criminals behind bars, and he’s going to make sure that they stay that way. And if that means keeping an eye on them until the helicopter gets here to take them to Supermax, he might as well use the time to gloat a little.

The two of them look surprisingly relaxed as Henriksen approaches the holding cell. They’re both sitting on the cell’s single bunk; Sam is furthest from the door, reclining with his back against the wall, while Dean sits forward on the end of the bed nearest the door in a posture of casual thoughtfulness. Only the tension in their shoulders and the lightning-quick glances that they exchange with one another as Henriksen enters the cell block betray the fact that they are both definitely on high alert. He’s glad that he’s studied these two psychos as closely as he did; a lesser agent might mistake their appearance of unconcern for the real thing, and might assume that it’s okay to let his guard down since both his prisoners have. Henriksen does the opposite; he places himself on even higher alert. They only have to wait a few more minutes for the helicopter, but if his experience at the bank taught him anything, it’s that a lot can happen in a few minutes, especially when the Winchesters are involved.

Dean and Sam both turn their heads to stare at him as he steps up to the cell door, and the silence stretches between them, tense as wire. Despite himself, Henriksen feels a shiver go down his spine. It’s like being stared down by the lions in the zoo. He knows these boys are dangerous—they’ve tortured and murdered and done unspeakable things to corpses and practice all sorts of Satanic rituals—but seeing them now, in chains and behind bars, brings it home in a way that none of their previous, albeit brief, face-to-face confrontations have before. There is something… not right about either of them, and it disturbs him to realize that this is a new piece of the puzzle that is their profile that he can’t easily explain.

He’s the one in charge here now, though, so he brushes his unease aside and breaks the ice with a little of that gloating he was already planning to do. “You know what I’m trying to decide?” he asks them.

“I don’t know, what? Whether Cialis will help you with your little condition?”

He had expected that from Dean, had been hoping for it, really. Anything to get the man to talk, to distract them just a little longer from whatever insane escape attempt they are doubtless planning as he speaks. “What to have for dinner tonight,” he replies, ignoring Dean’s attempt to get a rise out of him. “Steak or lobster.” Sam gives him a sidelong glance at this, and Dean smirks at his hands. “What the hell, surf and turf,” Henriksen declares heartily. “I got a lot to celebrate. I mean, after all… seeing you two in chains…”

That gets their attention. Sam stares in his direction, expressionless, but Dean turns his smirk up and returns Henriksen’s snark with a little of his own. “You kinky son-of-a-bitch. We don’t swing that way.”

“Now, that’s funny,” Henriksen retorts, wondering how long he can keep the casual jabs coming.

Not that long, unfortunately. “You know, I wouldn’t bust out the melted butter just yet,” Dean says, still grinning as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Couldn’t catch us at the bank, couldn’t keep us in that jail…”

Henriksen doesn’t need this smart-ass punk reminding him of his failures. He gets enough of that from his superiors. He doesn’t let it bother him yet, though. “You’re right,” he says with a shrug and a self-deprecating smile. “I underestimated you. Didn’t count on you being that smart.” He returns insult for insult, and the flicker of a glare that crosses Dean’s face lets him know he hit a sore spot. “But now I’m ready.”

Dean has to have the last word, as always. “Yeah? Ready to lose us again?”

Henriksen lets his smile turn condescending, with just a bit of vicious triumph laced into his voice. “Ready like a court order to keep you in a Supermaximum prison in Nevada ’til trial. Ready like isolation in a soundproof, windowless cell so small that, between you and me, it’s probably unconstitutional.” He grins wolfishly as he watches the cocky smile slide from Dean’s face. “How’s that for ready?”

He’s a little bit proud to see that they are genuinely worried now. Sam’s steady gaze turns on his brother, and Dean wipes a hand across his chin in a clear sign of nervousness. Henriksen can’t help but twist the knife a little deeper while he has them pinned like this. “Take a good look at Sam,” he tells Dean. “You two will never see each other again.”

That swings both hard gazes around towards him, and the flash of fury in both pairs of eyes—Sam’s especially—is more than a little disconcerting, but Henriksen doesn’t let it show. “Aw, where’s that smug smile, Dean?” he taunts. “I want to see it.”

Instead of getting defensive, though, Dean just looks away and shakes his head. “You’ve got the wrong guys,” he mutters.

Henriksen is prepared for this tactic—it’s the one that’s gotten both of these men out of the custody of local yokel cops more times than he cares to remember. “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” he shoots back sarcastically. “You fight monsters. Sorry, Dean, but the truth is, your daddy brainwashed you with all that devil talk and probably touched you in a bad place. That’s all. That’s reality.”

Not lions. Wolves. That’s what Henriksen sees staring back at him when he makes the not-exactly-a-mistake of mentioning their father. Sam sits up at the accusation, and the brothers turn as one to pin Henriksen with twin expressions of cold fury. He almost takes a step back, but then Dean’s hiss of “You shut your mouth” breaks the tension enough to allow him to keep going. “Well, guess what,” he shoots back. “Life sucks. Get a helmet. ‘Cause everyone’s got a sob story, but not everybody becomes a killer.” The sound of the chopper neatly punctuates the end of his speech. Dean’s eyes stay locked with Henriksen’s, but Sam turns to look up at the barred window across from the door, breaking the predatory spell they had cast over the exchange. “And now I have two less to worry about,” Henriksen says, giving Dean a case of his own medicine with a cocky grin. He waits for Dean to look away first—which he does—then looks down at his watch. “Mm, it’s surf and turf time.” He laughs and leaves. He can feel their eyes on him as he exits the cell block, but the tension is gone, and he knows he doesn’t have anything to fear from the Winchester brothers any more.

**********

Deputy Director Groves hasn’t been in with the prisoners for more than five minutes when Henriksen, who is working with Reidy on the ream of paperwork he’s been handed, hears an unholy scream issuing from the cell block down the hallway. “What the hell was that?” He and his partner both draw their guns and race towards the holding cells, followed by the sheriff and one of his deputies.

The scene when they pull the door open and enter the room is worse than Henriksen had expected. Sam Winchester is standing inside the cell with the Director’s gun in his hands, and Groves is slumped over on the floor right in front of the cell bars, almost certainly dead. The room erupts in chaos.

“Put the gun down!” the sheriff is shouting.

Sam’s hands go up immediately. “Wait, okay, wait,” he pleads.

“He shot him!” the sheriff calls out as the rest of them draw their guns on the two men in the cell.

“I didn’t shoot him, okay?” Sam is still protesting as he goes to his knees, holding the gun loosely by the butt between two fingers. “I didn’t shoot anyone!”

“He shot me!” a voice says. Henriksen thinks it’s Dean, but he has eyes only for Sam at the moment.

“Get on your knees now!” Henriksen shouts at him.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Sam stammers out as he drops to his knees. “Don’t shoot, please.” He bends down and drops the gun on the floor on the other side of the bars, then backs up and raises his hands again. “Look. We didn’t shoot him. Check the body. There’s no blood. We did not kill him.”

It is only then that Henriksen registers that Dean, who is also on his knees on the floor next to Sam, is hunched over in pain. His right hand is clutching his left shoulder, and blood is dripping through his fingers and down his wrist. Henriksen also notices a number of bullet holes in the wall of the cell that had not been there five minutes ago. It’s the only thing that convinces him to let his guard down long enough to gesture for Reidy to check the Director’s body. “Go ahead, check him.”

“Vic, there’s no bullet wound,” he hears Reidy say a moment later.

“He’s probably been dead for months,” Dean spits out.

“What did you do to him?” Henriksen demands. Dean may be the one that was shot, but he isn’t about to put anything past the Winchesters.

“We didn’t do anything!”

“Talk, or I shoot!”

“You won’t believe us!” Dean shouts back, defiant even while in obvious pain.

Henriksen contemplates pulling the trigger anyway, despite the need for answers and the fact that doing so would probably cost him his job, but then Sam says, in a near-whisper, “He was possessed.”

“Possessed?” Dean was right; he doesn’t believe them. It figures they would fall back on all that devil-worship crap when backed into a corner. Well, whatever their plan to get out of here was, it failed, and he’s not going to give them a second chance. “Right. Fire up the chopper,” he tells Reidy while keeping his eyes and his gun trained on the prisoners. “We’re taking them out of here now.”

“Yeah, do that,” Dean says, and for a second, Henriksen can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or sincere. He doesn’t have time to figure it out, though, because Reidy is calling the chopper pilot on the radio, and there’s nothing but static on the other end. With a look, he sends Reidy out to find out what’s going on with the chopper, then has the sheriff and his deputy move the Director’s body into one of the other holding cells while he picks up the radio and the Director’s gun. Just as he’s contemplating opening the cell and getting the Winchesters moving himself just to save time, the radio crackles to life. Static rushes over the line, and then, from outside, there is a very large explosion. “What the hell was that?” He calls over the radio, “Reidy? Reidy!”

For an answer, all he gets is a scream.

**********

Back in the office, everyone is panicking. The sheriff and his deputies are pulling weapons out of cabinets and loading up rifles while the secretary, Nancy, tries to get a line on phones that have all suddenly gone dead. The sheriff is demanding answers, and Henriksen wishes he had some to give the man, but he doesn’t. He saw this coming—he knew the Winchesters were going to pull something—and now he just has to make sure that his next move doesn’t play right into their hands. He knows they know that this place is remote, poorly-staffed, and ill-equipped to handle criminals of their caliber, so the first thing he has to do is get everyone else to stop panicking and start acting like professionals.

And then all the lights go out.

That just leads to further panic from the locals, but for Henriksen, it is the final piece of the puzzle. He knows what the end-game is now. So when the sheriff starts demanding that they get ready to move out, he shuts the man down completely. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Everybody calm down.”

“Calm down?” The sheriff’s eyes are wild. “Henriksen, your partner is out there! My men are out there!”

He knows that, and he also knows that they’re all likely dead already. Even Reidy, but he can’t let himself think about that at the moment. “I know, but, we go out there, we’re asking to die too. Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?”

“They’re out there, and they’re coming in here. This is a siege. So this might be a good time for you to lock the doors and windows, take a breath, and maybe deal with this like trained professionals with some sense in their heads!”

He hadn’t wanted to shout, but it gets through to them where quiet stoicism didn’t. The sheriff immediately calms down, his deputies follow suit, and they go off to follow his instructions. Henriksen, for his part, heads towards the cell block. He doesn’t know exactly what the Winchesters’ plan is, but given how much their capture has already cost him, he sure as hell isn’t going to let it succeed.

When he enters the cell block again, Sam is taking care of the gunshot wound in Dean’s shoulder. “Don’t be such a wuss,” Sam mutters to his brother as he puts pressure on the wound, and Dean grimaces in pain. Neither of them have noticed him, and he’d love to use the chance to observe how they interact with one another in a crisis situation, be he doesn’t really have time. “So, what’s the plan?” he asks outright, causing them both to start as they turn to look at him. “Kill everyone in the station, bust you two out?”

“The hell are you talking about?” Dean asks.

“I’m talking about your psycho friends,” Henriksen replies, not buying his wide-eyed confusion for an instant. “I’m talking about a bloodbath.”

“I promise you, whoever’s out there, they’re not here to help us,” Dean says, and, as if on cue, Sam follows up with, “Look, you’ve gotta believe us. Everyone here is in terrible danger.”

It would have been a bit more convincing if Henriksen hadn’t already known that. “You think?”

“Why don’t you let us outta here so we can save your asses.”

Henriksen almost laughs out loud at Dean’s request, then wonders exactly how many times this ploy has worked for these two. “From what?” he asks. In reply, they both give him near-identical glances of extreme frustration, then shrug their shoulders and look away. “You gonna say ‘demons’?” Henriksen demands, letting them know that they are not going to pull one over on him. Not this time. “Don’t you dare say ‘demons’. Let me tell you something,” he says, getting their attention one last time. “You should be a lot more scared of me.” They don’t appear convinced, but he doesn’t care. They’re psychos, he’s not going to get any straight answers out of them, and he has a station to defend until backup arrives.

Less than two steps out of the cell block, he is enveloped by a cloud of black smoke and everything goes dark.

**********

When Henriksen comes to, he’s lying on the floor of the Winchesters’ cell, soaking wet. He sits up and coughs, spitting out water.

“Henriksen. Hey, is that you in there?”

He turns to see Sam, slumped against the bars next to the open cell door. He looks winded, and very concerned. Henriksen scrambles to his feet and goes for his gun, but it isn’t there. Then, he sees the body of the sheriff lying next to Sam inside the open cell, and everything that he’d done comes rushing back to him. He collapses into a sitting position on the bed. “I… I shot the sheriff,” he stammers, clenching his fists to keep from shaking. He doesn’t know why he did it; all he remembers is not being in control of his body.

“But you didn’t shoot the deputy.” Dean says with an awkward smirk that causes Sam to turn and pin him with a disgusted glare. His attempt to lighten the mood is not appreciated by anyone, but it at least gives Henriksen a few moments to finish processing what he remembers about the last few minutes.

“Five minutes ago, I was fine, and then…” He tries to explain it, but he can’t. It all sounds too crazy in his head; if he lets it come out his mouth, he loses control of the situation entirely, which he cannot afford to do at the moment.

“Let me guess,” Dean speaks up, all traces of humor gone from his face. “Some nasty black smoke jammed itself down your throat?”

Henriksen doesn’t want to admit that that’s exactly what happened to him, doesn’t want to feed these psychos’ delusions, but his eyes go wide, and he can tell from the looks both prisoners are giving him that they know the truth. “You were possessed,” Sam says gently.

“Possessed, like… possessed?” he still can’t bring himself to say the word ‘demon’, but he knows that’s exactly what they’re talking about.

“That’s what it feels like,” Sam says, the weight of his words indicating that he knows exactly what Henriksen has just experienced. “Now you know.”

“I owe you the biggest ‘I told you so’ ever,” Dean says, then, to Henriksen’s surprise, he hands him back his gun. As Henriksen takes it from him, he feels his entire worldview shift. Sam and Dean aren’t the monsters he had believed them to be. If demons are real, then everything else they told him about, everything they had claimed to be saving people from… maybe it’s all real too. If nothing else, given that they stood there inside an open cell and saved him from being possessed rather than using the opportunity to escape means that they were probably telling the truth about the fact that the building wasn’t being sieged in order to help them. Which means that they are probably the only chance the rest of them have of surviving the night. “Officer Amici,” he calls over to the deputy, who is standing outside the cell with a rifle. “Keys.” Officer Amici hands over the keys, and Henriksen makes short work of removing the prisoners’ shackles. “So,” he says, trading glances with the two men. “All right, so how do we survive?”


	11. Lucifer Rising

Dean is pacing around the angels’ Green Room, ignoring the burgers and beer they have left for him. Bobby’s words are still ringing in his head. He doesn’t know where Sam is right now, or if he’s gone complete Dark Side yet, but he knows he can’t leave things the way he did. Sam is his brother, and, like Bobby said, the last thing he wants to do is treat Sam the way Dad did. He doesn’t know what the angels are going to ask of him, or if he’ll even survive it. He may never see his brother again. There’s also a fair chance that Sam won’t want to see him or speak to him again even if things do go their way, and he finds that he’s a bit afraid of discovering that to be the case, but eventually the need to let Sam know that he hadn’t meant what he said wins out. “Ah, screw it,” he says to the empty room as he flips open his phone and dials Sam’s number.

The call goes straight to voicemail, which is simultaneously a relief and a disappointment. “Hey, it’s, uh… me,” Dean says, forcing words out of a suddenly dry mouth. He should have spent more time figuring out what he was going to say before dialing. Finally, not wanting to run out of time, he clears his throat. “Look, I’ll just get right to it. I’m still pissed… and I owe you a serious beatdown… but…” After another long pause, just to get up the courage to go on, he continues, “I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m not Dad. We’re brothers, you know? We’re family, and… uh… no matter how bad it gets, that doesn’t change. Sammy, I’m sorry.”

The phone suddenly beeps and cuts him off, indicating that he’s reached the message length limit. He contemplates calling back, but he doesn’t know what else he can say. All he can do is hope that Sam gets the message before it’s too late, and also that, if they both survive whatever’s coming, they can try and fix the mess they’ve both made of their lives together over the past year.

**********

Sam is standing on the side of the road, contemplating the sign for Saint Mary’s Convent and trying to ignore the faint sounds of screaming still coming from inside the trunk. He’s been certain for months that he’s doing the right thing, but now, faced with having to kill a young woman and drink her blood in order to be strong enough to take on Lilith, he’s not so sure. Especially since everyone, from the angels to his own brother, have been telling him for months that this isn’t his job.

“Sam, it’s time. Are we doing this or not?”

Sam cares about Ruby—he wouldn’t have survived Dean’s time in Hell without her, and she’s the only one who has supported him unconditionally over the course of this last terrible year—but sometimes he wishes she would stop being so pushy. “Give me a minute to think,” he says without looking at her.

“Sam—”

“Give me a damn minute, Ruby!”

“Better think fast,” she mutters, and he can hear her rolling her eyes. It’s not her encouragement he needs right now. He already knows what she’s going to say. And there’s no point in praying to Cas or any of the other angels—they think he’s an abomination, and will probably kill him to stop him if he lets any of them know where he is or that he’s vulnerable. There’s only one person who’s ever been able to say exactly what he needs to hear in times like this. The only problem is, he’s not sure if that’s entirely true any more.

Dean had tried to call him, though, and had bothered to leave a message, so maybe there’s still hope. Maybe his brother does have something to say that will put all this in perspective and help him make the right choice. Taking a deep breath, Sam pulls out his phone, holds it to his ear, and listens to the message.

“Listen to me you blood-sucking freak,” Dean’s voice growls out of the speaker, and Sam almost drops the phone. Gripping it tighter, he forces himself to keep listening. “Dad always said I’d either have to save you or kill you. Well I’m giving you fair warning; I’m done trying to save you. You’re a monster, Sam. A vampire. You’re not you any more, and there’s no going back.”

Sam feels tears welling in his eyes. He wants to fall to his knees and cry, but he hasn’t got time for that. He can mourn the loss of his brother once he’s stopped the Apocalypse. That’s the only way to redeem himself now. If there’s no going back, his only choice is to keep moving forward, to prove to them all that he did this for the right reasons. Once it’s all over, he’ll face the consequences of what he’s done to his brother, but he can’t stop, no matter what Dean says or thinks. And if that means dying, well… what has he got to live for now?

 


	12. Dark Side of the Moon

A roll of thunder startles Dean awake, and he opens his eyes to find himself sitting in the driver’s seat of the Impala on the side of a dark, deserted highway, alone. The sounds of Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ filter softly from the radio. He turns off the car, gets out, and looks around, trying to get his bearings. The night is dark and moonless, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of civilization for miles. He doesn’t know where he is, how he got here, or where Sam is, but just as he closes the car door, he hears the trunk slam.

Spinning around, he sees a short, scrawny kid of around thirteen or fourteen standing behind the Impala holding a crate of fireworks. The kid looks very familiar, but it takes a minute for Dean to put all the pieces together: the shaggy brown hair, the ratty hoodie and jeans that are a few sizes too big, and the way the kid’s looking at him like he hung the moon and all the stars in the sky. “Sammy?”

Sam—because it is Sam as a teenager—just hoists the crate higher in his arms and grins. “Come on, let’s go!” Then he’s headed for the open field on the far side of the road.

“Weird dream,” Dean mutters as he follows the kid.

Sam sets the crate of fireworks down in the grass and pulls out two Roman candles, then looks up at Dean with shining eyes. “Got your lighter?” Dean looks down and suddenly realizes that, while he looks and feels like his thirty-one-year-old self, he is dressed like he is seventeen again, complete with ripped jeans, biker boots, and Dad’s old leather jacket. He reaches into the jacket’s pocket and pulls out his very first Zippo. “Woah, I haven’t seen this in years,” he says as he flips it open. He’d lost it on a hunt, or burning a ghost’s remains, or maybe he’d left it behind in a hotel room; he doesn’t remember. He’s gone through dozens since then, but he’s never forgotten this one, because his dad had given it to him right before his very first hunt.

“Fire ‘em up,” Sam says, clearly not caring about Dean’s wave of nostalgia as he hands his brother one of the Roman candles. Dean lights Sam’s firework, then his own, and they hold them up like torches and watch as they fire off into the night sky, illuminating the trees around the open field and bathing both their faces in red and gold light.

“I remember this!” The memory returns to Dean in one of the flashes of light. “It’s Fourth of July, 1996.” He looks down at the spent firework in his hand, then over at his little brother.

“Dad would never let us do anything like this,” Sam says when he catches Dean looking at him. “Thanks, Dean. This is great.” His eyes are shining, and he suddenly grabs Dean in a hug. In that moment, the dream feels so real that Dean doesn’t think to pull away, or hug Sam back, or do anything except stand there, frozen, remembering how easy his brother used to be with his affections and suddenly finding that he misses it. Eventually, he manages to put his arms around Sam and return the favor in the most awkward big-brother fashion imaginable, but Sam doesn’t seem to mind. He pulls away after a moment, looking back up at Dean. Dean, remembering exactly what is going to happen next, just grins and nods, then backs up a few steps and watches as Sam hauls the rest of the crate of fireworks to the middle of the field.

“Fire in the hole,” Sam shouts as he lights one of the fireworks in the box, then he runs back to Dean, his whole face alive with excitement. As the two of them stand there and watch, the whole box goes up, and the fireworks start launching themselves towards the sky. Dean knows how this memory ends—with the field on fire, and he and Sam hauling ass out of there in the Impala and stopping for burgers and milkshakes at a twenty-four-hour diner an hour’s drive down the road, and a major chewing-out from Dad when he shows back up at the hotel early and finds out that they’ve been out all night—but as he watches Sam whooping and hollering and dancing under the showers of sparks falling from the night sky, Dean knows that he would trade every moment of his life from this one onward just to get back a single night like this—just him and Sam, with no monsters or ghosts to hunt, with no angels or demons or the fate of the world resting on their shoulders.

But then, as he watches the fireworks exploding above him in showers of sparks, another memory hits him—gunshots, and Sam lying on a hotel-room bed in a pool of blood, and Walt and Roy standing over him with shotguns—and when he looks back down, the field is empty and the night is dark and silent once again. “Sam?” he calls out once, though he doesn’t expect an answer. Sam is gone, and as Dean heads back to the Impala, he begins to suspect that this is more than just a dream.

**********

Sam is in the middle of one of the more awkward experiences of his life, made even worse by the fact that, though he appears to be dreaming about a memory from when he was only eleven years old, he looks and feels like his current age of twenty-seven. He wants to take off the stupid blue tie he’s wearing and loosen the collar of his dress shirt—both of which had been the height of fashion for his eleven-year-old self and some of the first clothes he remembered having that weren’t hand-me-downs—but the man sitting at the head of the table carving the turkey is looking right at him, and he doesn’t want to fidget.

“So, Sam. I hear you’re new to McKinley.”

Sam thinks back, pulling the words of the conversation from deep within his memory. “Um, yes, sir. Two weeks.”

“Well, Stephanie over here just can’t seem to stop talking about you,” the man says with a fond smile.

“Dad, shut up!” The girl sitting next to Sam flashes an embarrassed grin at her father, revealing a mouth full of braces, then smiles shyly at Sam. He smiles back, trying not to feel like a creep. It’s just a memory, after all. A memory of him at eleven years old, being invited to his very first real Thanksgiving by the girl he’d had a crush on. Why he is dreaming about it now, he has no idea, though. Then, Stephanie squeezes his thigh under the table and he jumps. The whole table shakes, but no one seems to notice. His face flaming with embarrassment, Sam looks up at the entrance to the dining room to find Dean standing there, smirking at him.

“Wow,” Dean says, not even trying to hide his glee at seeing Sam in such an awkward position. “Just… wow.”

“Dean? What are you doing in my dream?” The rest of the family hasn’t noticed him, and Sam knows this isn’t part of his memory, but the figure standing in the doorway is acting way too much like the real Dean to be just another element of his dream.

And, as if to confirm his suspicions, Dean doesn’t say anything in response, just gives him one of his patented ‘are you kidding me?’ looks and gestures with his head towards the living room. Sam gets up and follows him without hesitation, only realizing once he’s out of the dining room that Stephanie’s family has continued their conversation as if he had never stood up, including talking to his empty chair as if he were still sitting in it. It’s odd, but no odder than Dean suddenly showing up here dressed like a teenager again.

“What’s going on?” he asks his brother, keeping his voice low despite the fact that he’s sure the people in the other room aren’t listening.

“This isn’t a dream, Sammy,“ Dean say bluntly. “We’re in Heaven.”

“Heaven?”

“Yup.”

As soon as Dean says it, Sam has a flash of memory, of waking up to find two masked men standing over his and Dean’s beds in their hotel room, guns drawn. He remembers Dean outing them as Roy and Walt, of them staring him down with ice-cold eyes as he tried to stammer out some sort of plea for his life, and then… nothing. He assumes they killed him, and if Dean’s here too, that means they didn’t want to leave witnesses, which makes them first on his list of people to hunt down and teach a lesson as soon as Lucifer brings him back. He knows that’s inevitable, but that just raises the question, “Okay, how are we in Heaven?”

Dean shrugs, probably thinking the same thing he is. “All that clean living, I guess,” he says with a smirk.

Sam appreciates the attempt at humor, but right now, he needs real answers. “No, no. You, I get, sure.” Dean is Michael’s vessel, the righteous man, and, more importantly, he’s done his time in Hell already. The angels think he’s worthy. “But me? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve… done a few things?” Like drinking demon blood and starting the Apocalypse, for an opener, not to mention the fact that he’s Lucifer’s vessel.

“You thought you were doing the right thing.”

He appreciates his big brother’s vote of confidence, but, “Last time I checked, it wasn’t the road to Heaven that was paved with good intentions.”

Dean shrugs, unable to argue with that. “Yeah, well, if this is the Skymall, it sucks. I mean, where’s the triplets and the latex, you know? Come on, a guy has needs.”

Sam really didn’t need that image in his head, but Dean has a point. If this is Heaven, it’s not exactly what either of them—or likely anyone else, for that matter—has been led to expect. “You know,” he says after thinking about it for a moment, “when you bite the dust, they say your life flashes before your eyes.”

“Your point?” Dean asks distractedly, apparently still thinking about triplets and latex.

“This house,” Sam explains with a gesture. “It’s one of my memories.”

Understanding dawns on Dean’s face. “When I woke up, I was in one of my memories,” he explains. “The Fourth of July when we burned down that field?”

Sam nods and smiles in recollection. That had been one of the best nights of his life. “Maybe that’s what Heaven is,” he theorizes. “A place where you relive your greatest hits.” For a brief second, he wonders why Dean saw that when he got this memory. It was a happy enough one, but it didn’t hold a candle to some of the best moments of his life, as few and far between as those had been.

Dean seems to be thinking the same thing. “Wait, so… playing footsie with brace-face in there? That’s a trophy moment for you?”

Sam shrugs and looks back at the dining room, where the happy family is still digging into the delicious dinner and carrying on as if Sam had never left. He suddenly has an irrational urge to defend the moment in the face of Dean’s disdain. “Dean, I was eleven years old. This was my first real Thanksgiving.”

Dean reacts to this explanation exactly as Sam had known he would. “What are you talking about? We had Thanksgiving every year.”

Sam rolls his eyes at this. “We had a bucket of extra-crispy and Dad passed out on the couch.” Not that he didn’t have happy memories of holidays with his family—and why hadn’t Heaven shown him one of those, like the Christmas when he’d given Dean the amulet?—but there were a lot less of them than he’ll ever get Dean to admit to. Sam can see a fight brewing, and opens his mouth in an attempt to change the subject, but just then, all the lights go out and the house begins to shake, effectively ending the conversation for them.

**********

When Dean stands up from racing the toy car around the old racetrack, just like he remembers doing for hours when he was little, the world has shifted around him. Wherever they are now, he doesn’t think it’s the Garden, though. He stands up an looks around at the little kid’s bedroom that has materialized around him and Sam. Sam is back in his normal clothes—the dress shirt and tie are gone—and Dean can tell without looking that he’s no longer wearing Dad’s leather jacket any more.

“That was the road?” Sam asks, still staring at the racetrack.

“I guess.” Dean is disappointed at not being able to drive through Heaven in the Impala again, but at least the trip was faster this time. “Kind of trippy, right?”

“Yeah.” Sam gives him a glance, then an odd smirk. “More trippy… um… apparently you ‘wuv hugs’.”

Dean looks down in confusion to see that, under his usual flannel shirt, he is wearing a baby blue t-shirt with a smiling teddy bear and the words “I Wuv Hugs’ on it. “Shut up,” he growls at Sam. The embarrassing outfit is the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to figure out where they ended up though. “Wait a minute. I know where we are.” He looks around the room again, swallowing a lump in his throat as he recognizes it all for the first time.

“Where?” Sam asks.

“We’re home.”

And then, before Sam can ask him what he mans by that, a soft voice from the hallway outside the bedroom door answers all his brother’s questions better than he ever could. “Dean…” Both boys look towards the door as their mother opens it. “Hey, Dean,” she says, smiling at her oldest son. “You hungry?”

Dean knows they can’t linger here, that Zachariah will find them if they don’t keep moving, but upon seeing his mother’s face, he decides that he doesn’t care. He needs this moment, this memory, just these few minutes. He can’t even bring himself to care that Sam is standing there, speechless, while Mary walks past him as if he doesn’t exist. With a nod, he takes her hand and lets her lead him out of the room to the kitchen.

**********

The angels have to be screwing with him. That’s the only explanation. Sure, the memory of the two weeks he spent on his own in Flagstaff had been exciting, liberating even, but there was a reason why he’d come back on his own, even knowing the amount of trouble he was going to be in. He’d missed his family, and the memory of those two weeks alone had led him to a realization of just how important they were to him… especially Dean.

And now, to walk out of that memory straight into the memory of the night when all of that family loyalty had betrayed him… it’s too much. It’s almost a reflex to deny recognizing the old cabin they’re standing outside of, but even as he says it, he knows Dean doesn’t believe him. He tries to distract him by reminding him about the road and their search for God, but that only serves to make Dean more suspicious.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Dean says as he looks around. “This?” Sam flinches when recognition lights his brother’s eyes. “This is the night you ditched us for Stanford, isn’t it?” Sam can’t deny it, but he can’t look his brother in the eye either. “This is your idea of Heaven? Wow.” Dean huffs out a humorless laugh that Sam recognizes all too well; he braces himself to be punched in the face at any second. But Dean, for once, doesn’t break out the violence. He just turns away from Sam and says, “This was one of the worst nights of my life.”

Which hurts worse than a punch to the face would have. It had been for Sam, too, but he can’t deny that there had been an up-side to it as well. “I can’t control this stuff,” he mutters as he wonders who is.

“Seriously?” Dean turns back to him, obviously angered by his shoddy defense of something he has no control over. “I mean… this is a happy memory for you?”

“I don’t know,” Sam protests, trying to defend the confusing mix of feelings churning in his gut, trying to find any reason to justify Heaven thinking that this memory was one worth spending the rest of eternity reliving. “I mean… I was on my own… I finally got away from Dad…”

Before he can finish explaining, though, Dean cuts him off. “Yeah, he wasn’t the only one you got away from,” he snaps, turning his back on Sam again.

“Dean, I’m sorry.” It’s not enough, but it’s all he can manage at the moment. There are more important things to be worry about anyway, aren’t there? “I just…”

“I know.” Dean cuts him off again, then throws his words from five minutes ago back in his face. “You just didn’t think of it like that.”

“Dean…”

“C’mon!” Dean whirls back around, hurling the biting anger of his words at Sam like knives. “Your Heaven is somebody else’s Thanksgiving, okay? It’s bailing on your family! What do you want me to say?”

Sam wants Dean to say that he understands, that things look different in the present then they do when you look back on everything you learned from them, or maybe that it’s possible that the angels are screwing with them, using their memories against them in an effort to drive the wedge between them deep enough that one or both of them will say “Yes” when all this is over. But all he can think about is how Dean got the memory of their mother smiling down at him. “Man, I never got the crusts cut of my PB&J,” he finds himself saying instead. “I just don’t look at family the way you do.”

He meant for it to hurt, the way that Dean’s words hurt him, and he knows it works when Dean’s eyes get unusually bright. “Yeah, but I’m your family,” he says, his voice hoarse and full of fury.

“I know…” Sam tries to explain, realizing even as he opens his mouth that his petty burst of jealousy has played right into the angels’ hands.

“I mean, we’re supposed to be a team. You and me against the world, right?”

“Dean, it is!”

“Is it?”

The words threaten to break Sam’s heart into a thousand pieces, but before he can say anything to make it right, Heaven’s searchlights light up the night sky.

**********

The sound of the amulet hitting the bottom of the empty trashcan finishes the job that Heaven had started, in exactly the way that the angels had wanted. Sam’s heart feels like it has shattered into a million pieces as he watches Dean walk out the door, leaving behind the first, best gift that Sam had ever given him, and, along with it, all his faith in his brother’s ability to do the right thing. Sam almost breaks right there, just to get it over with, but he can’t, because even if Dean doesn’t believe in him any more, he still has to believe in himself. He is not a monster. He doesn’t want to say “Yes” to the devil. He doesn’t want to end the world. He doesn’t know why Dean no longer seems to care that he would do anything not to be the harbinger of the end of the world, or why he doesn’t seem to see that it isn’t Sam’s fault that all this has come to rest on his shoulders, but he can’t give in now. His brother may have given up on him, but it isn’t the first time, and Sam won’t let it be the last. He can’t let it be the last, because if he can’t get Dean to believe in his strength any more, than he will truly be lost, and the world will be lost with him.


End file.
